Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Magical Girls Grown Up

The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

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Bingo 24: Swap Free Space for Diaspora Free Space invoked because I don’t have anything specific in mind for the Diaspora square and time is not on my side. I picked up The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry for the title. No other reason. Turns out this is actually book 2 in a series, but that doesn’t actually matter, as this story is pretty stand alone as far as I could tell. A lot is classic fantasy and romance tropes getting mixed up. Sometimes there’s […]

Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through

The Lightning Bottles by Marissa Stapley

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This book is part mystery, part road trip, part behind the music, part reflection on celebrity and how women are treated in the music industry, and also has almost a dash of a fairytale about it.  In the novel’s world, once upon a time (back in the early 1990’s), The Lighting Bottles were on top of the charts, a husband and wife duo, with him coming straight out of the Seattle Scene (she’s from Canada).  But behind the scenes (and this is the behind-the-music part) […]

Getting lost and found again

Home Away From Home by Cynthia Lord

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Mia is visiting her grandmother in Maine on her own for the first time. This would be exciting, but the reason her mom is staying behind is to sell their old family house, so they can move in with her new boyfriend. The changes are freaking Mia out a little, so she’s glad to visit her reliable Grandma in the small town of Stone Harbour. But when she arrives, she finds that things have changed at Grandma’s too – a boy about her age named […]

Dorothy Dingle: the Perfect Mother

The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko

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After his mother has been gone for a week, eleven-year-old Hank and his toddler sister Boo are forced to seek out the stranger listed as their emergency contact. But with Lou Ann’s help comes social workers and a new school, and Hank worries he might have made a huge mistake. I don’t read much middle grade nowadays, but I was intrigued by this book because I haven’t read any middle grade book dealing with foster care and parentification before. The author’s note about her own […]

Memoir of a Child Star

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

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Wow. This one was brutal. Jennette McCurdy is an excellent writer and draws you in from the very beginning of her memoir. I’ll admit, I had to put this down many times and opt out of reading it at night just becuase I couldn’t stop thinking about the things I read. McCurdy is a survivor of trauma at the hands of the industry and at the hands of her own mother. She paints a vivid picture of the abuse and exploitation she suffered, able to […]

If the “them apples” guy wrote a book, this would be it.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey

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What do Usher and St. Augustine have in common? I enjoyed their Confessions more than Thomas De Quincey’s. (Also, both Usher and Augustine were both great dancers in their prime.) There have probably been books that were more disappointing to me that Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but I can’t think of any right now. Mr. De Quincey’s Confessions first made itself known to me through Nick Tosches’ The Last Opium Den. That book was less about opium and more about the search for something […]



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